Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Return of the Epic
- Part I Epics and Ancient History
- 2 Sir Ridley Scott and the Rebirth of the Historical Epic
- 3 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and America since the Second World War: Some Cinematic Parallels
- 4 ‘There's Nothing So Wrong with a Hollywood Script that a Bunch of Giant CGI Scorpions Can't Solve’: Politics, Computer Generated Images and Camp in the Critical Reception of the Post-Gladiator Historical Epics
- 5 Popcorn and Circus: An Audience Expects
- Part II Epic Aesthetics and Genre
- Part III Epic Films and the Canon
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
2 - Sir Ridley Scott and the Rebirth of the Historical Epic
from Part I - Epics and Ancient History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Return of the Epic
- Part I Epics and Ancient History
- 2 Sir Ridley Scott and the Rebirth of the Historical Epic
- 3 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and America since the Second World War: Some Cinematic Parallels
- 4 ‘There's Nothing So Wrong with a Hollywood Script that a Bunch of Giant CGI Scorpions Can't Solve’: Politics, Computer Generated Images and Camp in the Critical Reception of the Post-Gladiator Historical Epics
- 5 Popcorn and Circus: An Audience Expects
- Part II Epic Aesthetics and Genre
- Part III Epic Films and the Canon
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
It was Sir Walter Scott who, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, invented the historical novel. It was Sir Ridley Scott (no relation) who, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, reinvented the historical epic. Of Walter Scott's medieval romances, Henry Beers wrote:
Scott apprehended the Middle Ages in their spectacular and more particularly their military sides. He exhibits their large, showy aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in halls, tourneys, sieges and the like. The motley medieval world swarms in his pages, from the King on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells … it was … the noise, bustle, colour, stirring action that delighted him.
It is a vision that is already inherently cinematic, and it was in the 1950s – by which time Scott's novels were largely unread – that Hollywood turned three of his most celebrated medieval romances into big-budget films: Ivanhoe (Thorpe 1952), The Talisman (filmed as King Richard and the Crusaders (Butler 1954)) and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (Thorpe 1955). However, Walter Scott had a political agenda. First, he sought to define and elaborate chivalry as the appropriate code of behaviour for gentlemen, and it was to become the dominant code of masculinity in both Britain and America for a century and a half. Second, as a practical upholder of the Hanoverian settlement and the Anglican Church who dreamed romantically of Jacobitism, the sacred lost cause of Scotland, and of an idealised medieval past, he sought in his novels consistently to dramatise the idea of reconciliation: between Cavalier and Roundhead, highlander and lowlander, Norman and Saxon, Jacobite and Hanoverian, in the interests of building a unified nation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Return of the Epic FilmGenre, Aesthetics and History in the 21st Century, pp. 19 - 35Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014